On the western front, the Allied plan in September was to continue to hammer away at the Germans. As previously noted, the War Cabinet had qualms about allowing the BEF to storm the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line. Since Lloyd George expected the war to extend at least into 1919, he did not want the British army to take the primary role in attempting to break through Germany's defenses. He was determined to ensure that when the fighting stopped, Britain would still retain sufficient military and economic strength to dictate peace terms to all the belligerents. But the matter was really out of his hands. Haig and Foch were of one mind about keeping the pressure on the Germans. The British government could hardly overrule Haig if he was acting under the orders of the generalissimo.

Haig journeyed to London on September 9 to persuade the government to allow him “to exploit our recent great success to the full.” The next day he had an interview with Milner and tried to impress upon him that German morale was breaking down and that victory was within sight. Milner had been subjected to that song and dance routine too many times in the past to fall prey to Haig's boundless enthusiasm. The British army had sustained 800,000 casualties since the start of the year and received only 700,000 drafts, leaving it 100,000 short.

Introduction: Economic Structure and External Orientation

Singapore's rapid economic development from a modest trading post under British colonial rule into a modern, prosperous, self-confident, and sovereign nation is one of the more notable success stories in growth and development during the second half of the 20th century. The Singapore economy has experienced one of the highest growth rates in the world over the past three decades, its gross domestic product (GDP) growing an annual average 7.6% during 1970-2005. The growth has in turn propelled Singapore's average real per capita income from $512 in 1965 to its current level of over $26,982 by 2005, which is one of the highest in the world (Figure 9.1).

However, long-term averages hide the fact that the Singapore economy has been fairly vulnerable to external shocks over the last 5 years. Specifically, following a sharp downturn in the global electronics industry and the sluggish regional and global growth, Singapore experienced an acute economic contraction in 2001, its worst in 30 years. Its impact on rising rates of redundancies, bankruptcies, financial and asset markets, consumer and business sentiment, and the like, have been deep and widespread. The depth of the recession was largely due to the confluence of a number of negative factors, including the events of 11 September 2001, the bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreaks, the December 2004 tsunami, war in the Middle East, shocks to the price of oil, and the dot-com bubble crash.

Lloyd George observed in his War Memoirs that trying to keep labor unrest within manageable limits was probably the most delicate and perilous task the British government faced on the home front during the Great War. The need to organize the nation's industrial resources for modern warfare transformed the state's relations with labor. It meant that the government was required to pay more attention to workshop conditions, seek to control wages, invite the advice of key trade unions such as the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and take a more active role in settling labor disputes. Prowar Labour Party leaders were brought into the government in the expectation that they could induce trade unions to forgo strike action.

As the conflict dragged on with no end in sight, war production became nearly as important as the fighting itself. This meant that the labor force had to be augmented and deployed effectively. At the commencement of the war the government had two options. First, to impose general conscription, both combatant and industrial, with every man of suitable age and health called up for national service and assigned to whatever task the government deemed appropriate. Soldier and civilian would stand on substantially the same footing with the latter regarded as a temporary exempted combatant and subject to the same discipline and obligation as the former. In this way, the government would exert control over the worker's movements and bind him to the job if it so wished.

Introduction

Bangladesh became an independent nation on 16 December 1971. Since then, the country has made impressive progress in some areas of economic development. Per capita income has more than tripled, human development has experienced remarkable progress, and the incidence of income and/or consumption poverty has nearly halved. But major challenges remain. Per capita income, which stands at $441, is low even by South Asian standards. Poverty is still rather high even though it has been declining. A number of human development indicators are still low even by standards of low-income economies. The development challenges for Bangladesh are quite daunting but by no means insurmountable.

Bangladesh must achieve faster pro-poor economic growth through more trade and investment growth, among other things, to hasten the process of poverty alleviation. While trade and investment flows can be expected to grow under the multilateral framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the experiences of many countries and subregions in different parts of the world indicate that significant benefit in this regard can be reaped through regional integration. East Asia and South Asia have been two of the fastest growing subregions in the world in recent times, with annual average growth rates of 6.9% and 5.8%, respectively, over the past decade. While Bangladesh has economic cooperation arrangements with the countries of South Asia, enhancing its economic cooperation with the East Asian countries would greatly benefit the country in terms of increased volumes of trade and foreign investment.

During the first year of the war there was nothing to suggest that Britain, the world's main carrier, would experience a shipping shortage of critical proportions. But by the end of 1915 the cumulative effect of factors associated with the enlarged scale of the conflict had begun to strain merchant shipping. In the first place, British merchant ships were requisitioned to transport troops, animals and stores to the various theaters of war. As many continental ports were closed to British traffic, it became necessary to travel longer distances to fetch food and raw materials. To make matters worse, much of Britain's overseas imports went to supply the requirements of its allies who were cut off from their prewar sources – Italy from countries now at war with it, and France from its own provinces now held by the enemy. Then, too, the submarine menace had not only reduced available tonnage, but required ships to take circuitous routes to avoid the danger zones. Finally, ships were often immobilized for long periods owing to congestion in the ports.

As the months passed, the exigencies of the war required increased imported supplies, while the number of ships to transport them diminished. In January 1916 the Asquith government appointed a Shipping Control Committee under Curzon to advise on allocating the requisitioned tonnage with the essential needs of the country.

Although Shelley's “Mont Blanc” is a difficult poem that has elicited widely differing interpretations, its readers have arrived at several generally accepted points of agreement about its significance and place in the Shelley canon. It is, for example, routinely assumed that this poem and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” are to be taken together, the one “sister” to the other.

Repeatedly in his prose speculations, Shelley insists upon the undifferentiated chaos we habitually make of our semantic and semiotic fields. When a linguistic community inevitably cannot sustain what the “Defence” calls the, “vitally metaphorical language of poetry,” it disorganizes a system of manifest relations into the opacity of dead metaphor. The process is nicely defined as “semantic entropy” by John Wright, and against this collective backsliding Shelley would frame his utterance so as to

Son of a Scottish laird by his second wife, after being educated partly abroad, Urquhart spent a few months at Woolwich Arsenal where, according to the 1898 DNB entry, he ‘acquired some knowledge of gunnery.‘Whilst at Oxford he was advised by Jeremy Bentham to travel in the Levant (Maehl, 1981: 512). His association with Ottoman Turkey began in 1827 when he fought briefly for the Greeks in their war of independence. After the war had ended he gained a name for himself by his report on the borders of the new state. In 1831 he accompanied Ambassador Extraordinary Sir Stratford Canning to Istanbul where he became first secretary at the British embassy. So began a career that saw Urquhart exercise an important influence on the public mind in the early and mid-Victorian periods as a propagandist for Turkey and a virulent enemy of Russia and Lord Palmerston. The 1830s was a decade in which he swapped diplomacy for political pamphleteering and intrigue and also succeeded in publishing The Spirit of the East: a Journal of Travels through Roumelia, a work that mixes unobtrusive political commentary with romantic descriptions of the wild and sublime scenery of Greece and Albania, and celebration of Ottoman culture and civility. From thereon political writings far outnumber works of travel – Lebanon: A History and a Diary of 1860, is a rare combination of the two.

No sooner had the War Cabinet given reluctant and conditional assent to the Flanders operation, than Lloyd George tried different means to prevent Haig from carrying it out, lobbying instead for his Italian scheme. His big opportunity came when he crossed the Channel on July 22, along with Robertson and several members of the War Cabinet, to attend an inter-Allied conference in Paris. Before the start of the conference, he visited Painlevé and dined with his old friend, Albert Thomas. He advanced his case for concentration on the Italian front and, while they were attentive and sympathetic, they remained noncommittal.

Robertson, for his part, had no idea that Lloyd George was planning to rally the French authorities to his peripheral strategy. His first intimation of Lloyd George's machinations came when he, Foch, Pétain and Cadorna were asked to advise on the feasibility of sending assistance to Italy. By now, nothing that Lloyd George did should have surprised Robertson. At the gathering, Robertson persuaded the generals that it was folly to flip from one war plan to another and that the only sensible thing to do was to allow the existing arrangements to stand. It was agreed by all that the dispatch of Anglo-French troops to the Italian front should be considered only after the battle in Flanders was over and its results assessed.

After Carsten Neibuhr's visit to Muscat in 1764, James Wellsted, a naval officer who travelled there in 1834–5, was among the first to explore the important districts of inner Oman including the Jebel Akhdar mountain range. Dedicated to the young Queen Victoria, Travels in Arabia was published in 1838. Its political context was the British expedition against the Bani Bu Ali tribe, which had converted to Wahhabism and defeated a British force in 1821. Wellsted was part of General Lionel Smith's expedition of 1834 that all but wiped the tribe out. Wellsted characterizes Sultan of Oman Sayid Said bin Sultan as liberal, tolerant, personally abstemious, and a keen ally of the British – ‘probably, if any native prince can with truth be called a friend to England it is the Imam of Maskat.’ The Sultan received him warmly furnishing him with presents and promising every assistance. According to Robin Bidwell (1976), Wellsted ‘had the greatest of all gifts in an explorer – an intuitive understanding of the people that he met and a sympathy with them’ (207). An Austrian editor of Travels in Arabia (1838) writes: ‘The description of Nizwa and above all the ascent of the Jabal Akhdar represents the highlight of Wellsted's book’ (Scholz, 1978: XVI) Wellsted's writing visits some of the key themes of travellers to Arabia: Bedouin nobility, Arab treatment of women, and the freedom the desert gave.

I write this essay with some degree of trepidation. First, because it is by no means an academic paper. Second, because in some senses this is not a subject that admits of academic presentation.

I am of this community but also in many senses outside its pale. If you hear the first person far too often in this essay, it is because it is largely one person's recollections of the last 55 years. No research work has gone into it. Aside from memory, this essay has few sources; however with memory having become the strong suit of social scientists in the present generation, I suppose you will bear with me.

Many years ago in 1956, when the oldest of my sisters married a Bengali, Acharya J B Kripalani, who was a good friend but no relation of my father's, sent my father a strange long telegram. Referring to his own marriage to a Bengali Brahmo woman Smt. Sucheta Majumdar, later first woman Chief Minister of an Indian state, and to that of Krishna Kripalani (also no relation) to Nandita, granddaughter of Rabindranath Tagore, he had written, and I quote the telegram exactly:

It is being increasingly recognized that Raja Rao is the most intellectually demanding of Indian English novelists. His texts have a discursive dimension which makes them essays on some of the major ideological and philosophical systems of our times. This concern with ideas and conceptual systems is typical of Raja Rao's fiction and is noticeable from his earliest works. Kanthapura (1938), for instance, is both an exploration and an exposition of Gandhian ideology, worked out through its application to a small, remote South Indian village. The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is a compendium of philosophical disquisitions on Vedanta, Bhakti, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Indian and European history, mysticism, mythology, metaphysics and so on. In fact, the novel is an exploration of India as an idea in contact with the West; as Rama, the protagonist puts it, ‘India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic’ (376). The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), too, is a Vedantic–Shakespearean parable on the working of self-surrender and grace or what Govindan Nair calls ‘the way of the Cat’. Finally, Raja Rao's much awaited, finally released tome, The Chessmaster and his Moves (1988), continues and intensifies the debates of The Serpent and the Rope. Among other things, it is a dialogue between a Brahmin and a Rabbi, symbolizing the quintessential confrontation between India and the West, the vertical and the horizontal, zero and infinity respectively.

This paper discusses the role of social capital as a policy tool against poverty and inequality in the development strategies enhanced by international agencies in rural India.

In spite of the important results in economic growth, rural India still shows a very high level of poverty and inequality. Moreover, many scholars (Morris, 1998; Krishna, 2003; and Dowla, 2006) have focused on the lack of social capital to account for the increasing gap between rural and urban India, pointing out that social capital exerts a deep influence on development processes, especially in rural areas. Finally, many international agencies have launched, in rural India, development projects in which social capital is seen as a strategic variable.

We argue that the role played by social capital in development processes suffer from some sorts of ambiguity. It is not clear whether the lack of ‘good’ social capital can be considered in theoretical terms as a main cause for the failure of development strategies, or it is only one among other causes. Moreover, there is some evidence (see below) that social capital is not influent at all, and that, due to ‘bad’ quality, can become an obstacle to growth. At the same time, from a policy point of view, a careful reading of programmes and reports of international organizations shows a basic incoherence between the verbal emphasis on social capital and the actual role that is assigned to it.